Check out this great podcast/article by Next System Project, interviewing Nishani Frazier on Black Power versus Black Capitalism. Frazier is a fellow at the Democracy Collaborative and an associate professor of history at Miami University of Ohio, who has recently wrote Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism.
Her work examines the black power strategies of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which pursued collective economic development strategies. But many of these ideas and programs were reinterpreted as Black Capitalism in the Nixon administration, promoting individual black ownership.
She sees a return to some of these ideas with some of today’s new radical black mayors – Ras Baraka in Newark and Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, MI. Three things she thinks we can learn from the experience of CORE include:
- Institutionalizing economic self determination in policy to build resources and infrastructure.
- Building economic independence so that city is not dependent on outside resources.
- Building the city as a whole.
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